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Re: Running ranlib after installation - okay or not?
- From: Ian Lance Taylor <ian at airs dot com>
- To: kaih at khms dot westfalen dot de (Kai Henningsen)
- Cc: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: 01 Sep 2005 11:18:39 -0700
- Subject: Re: Running ranlib after installation - okay or not?
- References: <Pine.BSF.4.62.0508311718400.22973@pulcherrima.dbai.tuwien.ac.at><m3wtm2kmsh.fsf@gossamer.airs.com> <m3wtm2kmsh.fsf@gossamer.airs.com><0b7e9f70d997eb3033872da5db37f4c8@physics.uc.edu><9d3A8aEHw-B@khms.westfalen.de>
kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) writes:
> pinskia@physics.uc.edu (Andrew Pinski) wrote on 31.08.05 in <0b7e9f70d997eb3033872da5db37f4c8@physics.uc.edu>:
>
> > If you consider Darwin "modern", then that statement is not correct
> > as moving/copying an archive on darwin, requires ranlib to be run.
>
> Is there a point to this behaviour? It sounds as if someone confused an
> archive with a nethack scorefile ...
a.out archives used to work this way too, e.g. on SunOS 4. The idea
was that people would often use ar without updating the symbol table.
Thus the symbol table has a timestamp. The linker checks that the
timestamp of the symbol table is not older than the file modification
time of the archive.
In practice this turned out to be a mistake, as everybody always
updated the symbol table with every use of ar, and it caused trouble
when simply copying archives around. So the notion was abandoned in
the move to COFF and ELF.
>From my perspective Darwin lives in its own little world, and I guess
they never abandoned the symbol table timestamp checking.
Ian